Springboard

Twenty-three passages from Rocking the Cradle of Civilization for great classroom discussions.

 Rocking the Cradle of Civilization is the story of Prairie Wind, a young Lakota Sioux woman who learned as a little girl about the extermination of the vast herds of buffalo that once thundered across the prairie. She learned as well about the virtual extermination of her own Lakota people. Whereas other children in America visit Disney World, Prairie Wind and her classmates visited the mass grave at Wounded Knee.

She travels from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota to a university in California, where she explores the twin fields of International Human Rights, and the Climate Crisis. With her brilliant mind and her background as a Native American, she graduates with a law degree which will enable her to speak in court rooms around the world.

Prairie Wind and her husband William—Oneida Iroquois from Upstate New York—spend three months on the islands of Tahiti and Mo’orea in the South Pacific. For the first time in their lives, they live where two cultures—French and Polynesian—coexist in racial harmony. They are liberated from the daily racial oppression in America. Further, the sea around the islands is a marine sanctuary, where life is protected, not plundered.

They return to the Rosebud Reservation—she as a lawyer and he as a doctor—to work with their Native American people during the four tumultuous years of the Trump administration. They become the parents of a little girl, and then of a little boy, both of whom rock in a handmade cradle under the care of their Lakota Sioux grandmother.

Read a full description of the book here.

Sample chapters:

Read chapter six here.

Read chapter eighty here.